That crunchy squish could be a Cuban brown snail under your foot

Encased in slime, eyeballs rotating on protruding stalks, it bellies through your backyard, seeking to sate its voracious appetite.

The rainy season is here, and so is the Cuban brown snail.

The mucus-laden, hermaphroditic gastropod is yet another entry in the parade of curious, non-native critters that have made South Florida home. And it has a taste for plants, especially ornamentals.

"The populations are spreading, and their numbers are increasing," said Fred Thompson, curator of malacology, or the study of mollusks, at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainvesville.

The gastropod — "belly walker" as loosely translated from the Latin — is the dominant snail in South Florida. It has no business here, having in the early 1900s been brought from Cuba on a whim by Charles T. Simpson, a soldier, sailor, cowboy and self-taught naturalist who must have been really lonely.

"I simply introduced the things for 'company' and not for any 'scientific results,' " he wrote a colleague at the time.

Now Zachrysia provisoria can number in the thousands per acre, nestling among dead leaves and organic matter. "It's doing well, let's put it that way," Thompson said. "It's not suffering from any predation of any sort."

Except the human foot. Stepping on the gooey creature — pray you're not barefoot — results in a crackly splat that ranks rather high on the yuckiness meter.

"It's kind of like, ugh!" said Greg Hodges, an entomologist with the state Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services.

"When you walk the driveway to the car it's crunch, crunch, crunch," said Darla DeMartino of Oakland Park, who has endured "tons" of snails in her yard this summer. "It's really no fun."

The snail needs moisture — rain or its own mucus — to survive and get around. "Try crawling on your belly a little bit, you'll get scraped," said Paul Skelley, another state entomologist.

"Essentially they swim on their mucus," said Thompson. Thus its trail of slime.

But you won't need a radar gun to clock the mollusk's speed. It moves at a brisk 1/300th of a mile per hour or, more appropriate for patio travel, 30 inches a minute.

That's during rainy season. In dry weather the snail retreats into a chocolate-colored, inch-wide shell and seals itself off, sometimes for months. With a lifespan of three to five years, the Cuban brown can outlast drought cycles.

Like a vampire, the snail shuns the sun. It emerges only at night to gnaw its way through plant matter — it particularly likes flowers, succulents and buds. A horn-like mouth can shred stalks and leaves, and even rasp through bark.

"I see people bring in damaged plants," said Deborah Levulis, a horticulturist with the Palm Beach County Extension Office. "They don't know what's been happening."

Zachrysia also has a taste for beer — a fatal taste. Drawn to the yeasty scent from a bowl of brew, the snail will drown in its drink of choice if it can't crawl back out.

When it comes to romance, the snail is no shrinking mollusk. It's hermaphroditic, with both male and female sex organs, and will mate for hours. "They inseminate one another simultaneously," said John Capinera, chairman of the Entomology and Nematology Department at the University of Florida.

They can also self fertilize. "If they can't find another snail, they just do it to themselves," the professor said.

During mating the snail employs what scientists technically term a "love dart," a little probing spear released by one or both partners. "It primarily just stimulates the skin," Thompson said.

While the gastropod could serve as a bite-sized, if challenging, menu item, experts caution against eating it. Not that it will poison you, but it may have ingested plants toxic to humans such as the oleander, and it doesn't meet the sanitary requirements for human consumption.

By contrast, French snails destined to become the delicacy escargot are raised on farms and fed special food.

State agriculture department spokeswoman Denise Feiber said the Cuban brown is part of an ongoing survey to determine its population and that of other pests. But counting them is about the best state officials can do. The slippery mollusks are too well-entrenched to be wiped out.

"They are so widespread now that eradication is not something we talk about," Capinera said. "You're always going to have these snails now."